Bad Poetry

Over the holidays a friend gave me a little cardboard box full of pretty little notebooks.  This sounds like a gift, but really it was just part of the reward I reaped for keeping him company while he cleaned out 10 years' worth of papers stuffed into his desk.  Occasionally he'd find something he hadn't used in several years and offer it to me.

The notebooks are unlined and pretty small -- about 1/4 of a standard sheet of paper -- so my first thought was, these are perfect for poetry!  Now, poetry always came naturally to me when I was younger, but it hasn't for at least 10 years or so.  I'm certain this event coincides with the point when I realized all the poetry I was writing was terrible.

Who knows if I still write bad poetry now, though, because I just stopped doing it.  Just about every other form of writing comes easily and reads well, so I figured I should just give up on writing poetry and lyrics.  However, receiving that box of little notebooks got me thinking: just like I give myself permission to write just about anything in my daily writing practice, maybe I should give myself permission to write bad poetry, too.  So that's what I'm doing: writing bad poetry in these little notebooks.  So far I've written about unrequited desires and fleeting fantasies and musings on the land of my birth, since most bad poetry tends to be about these things.

The thing is, a lot of good poetry is about that, too.  And if I never let myself write poetry because it's not coming out sounding perfect or right or even tolerable, I'll never come out on the other side.  Scrawling out a novel rather haphazardly seems to have been pretty well-received, so I'm going to try writing down some vaguely poetic lines in hopes of finding something good eventually.

And, to honor that sentiment, I'm putting something below the cut that I wrote in the car on the way up to Vermont the other day.  Leave something in the comments if you've ever hesitated to do something because you thought it wouldn't be good.



Memories tonight include:
air like home,
its oxygen flooding my veins,
filling me.

Silence audible,
night air
whirring thickly, darkest dark
in my ears.

Moonlight dreams paint fields
like silver halides,
black + white photos,
stars exploding.

Looking up up up,
dry winter air
crackling in my lungs, they are
papery thin.

Light pollution throws a halo
over trees,
edging over hills as wood smoke
casts a winter spell

and we hold plenty of secrets,
passed
between lips, under fingers.
Night air carries magic over miles,
its dark is deep
but refuses to be feared.